I just read this piece at Tech Republic:

https://www.techrepublic.com/a...

This looks to be a well funded fork?

I definitely hope Microsoft are not allowed anywhere near Linux as their track record currently with updates and poor quality control of their software generally is atrocious. I lost interest in Windows when they brought out Windows 8 and subsequently Windows 10. The final straw was the appalling failures caused by the Feature Updates breaking my system I finally had enough and just wholly switched to Linux. I just love how quick Linux runs on the same hardware and how little of a faff the updates are.

Given all that we definitely do not want any of that stuff getting into Linux.

Siv

You must be f@cking cracked if you put anything in the "Cloud", the Chinks have hacked all cloud providers, so anything there is being used by the Chinese to further their ambitions to take over the World. If you believe in the "Cloud", just cut out the middle man and send your code to Beijing directly. Keep your stuff off the internet and on your own servers away from the hacking community!

I am amazed that someone with a few brain cells hasn't figured out a way to have Trump committed. The concept that America could lift the isolation restrictions and be back in business in 3 weeks when literally millions of your citizens will be dying from the Coronavirus if no action is taken is frankly alarming. Please ignore your president, stay at home, protect your family, look at Italy, Spain and the UK and learn from our mistakes! This virus doesn't care how much bullshit comes out of your mouths, it will still kill you! Please take it seriously before it's too late!

Graham Sivill

I can't believe what has happened to the US, you were the nation that put a man on the moon and look at you now?

I am in the UK, and looking at Spain and Italy, if you guys in the US can't see the writing on the wall you deserve everything you are going to get over the next few weeks. Wake up, stay at home, keep isolated from all other human beings and pray to whatever you worship that you don't need a hospital because I can tell you no matter how brilliant you think you are in the US this fucking thing is coming for you!

In my experience over the years maintaining Windows systems, the main cause of slowdown over time is applications putting in start-up programs to check for updates. Worse still, programs like Adobe Reader (and LibreOffice if you let it) will part load themselves at start-up. Adobe reader used to do this whether you wanted it to or not. I am not sure if it still does, but I suspect it does. Anti-virus programs have a habit of loading services and other start -up actions that hold the system up until they have completed which again all adds to the feeling that your system is bloated and slow.

Tools like CCleaner have the ability to identify the start-up tasks and give you the option to disable them and this is a good way to test a) if it improves start-up performance and b) test whether doing so breaks any application in which case you can re-enable it again.

The only problem is CCleaner which was originally made by Piriform is now owned by Avast and their very first action was to allow a virus into the CCleaner code so that when users got their first update it infected them with a virus! So it does make me wonder how good Avast is as an AV program.

I am on Linux Mint 19.2 now so this shit doesn't affect me so much. I think the key issue has been Microsoft being a bit lax about allowing application developers to put in unnecessary start-up programs. It would be nice if they enforced that the user should always get the option to refuse the start-ups when installing the applications like some of the better ones already do.

Another option might be putting something less opaque then the old MSConfig program that allows you to see what's set to start up and be able to disable it as part of Windows Settings. In Windows 10 they did put a Start-Up section in the new Settings app, but it doesn't show everything that the likes of CCleaner does as with CCleaner you can see more low level stuff and also things like scheduled tasks which can be triggered by the start-up event.

Siv

Is it just me or has the US lost all credibility? A regulatory body cannot allow a commercial entity to self regulate itself ... PERIOD!

Siv

I switched from Windows 10 with a PC that has 32GB RAM to Linux Mint. I have a 5GB swap file (Mainly because I still run an 8GB RAM Windows 10 VM in VMWare and when I tried running it for the first time it (VMWare) complained that I had no swap file so I created a 5GB one) ever since then even when I am running loads of applications and Windows in VMWare and check the swap it's always resolutely zero. So I have no idea why VMWare wanted a swap file?

Perhaps when Florida disappears and New York with it the US will finally wake up and realise that global warming actually is a thing!

You obviously have not watched Jurassic Park! :)

Is it me or is this more about protecting US phone companies rather than anything to do with Huawei spying or stealing trade secrets. The reason I say that is, surely pretty much every device created in the electronics industry is made in China. If I was China and they are keen on spying what goes on in the western world, I would be putting backdoors into all the chips and motherboards that are inside Dell, HP and Apple PCs and devices so even if the things are constructed in the US the chips inside them are probably sourced from China. They probably don't give a shit about Huawei as they already spy on us through all the components in everything we use?

Or am I missing something?

I am a bit worried what happens when this escapes from the lab and and breeds with natural E.Coli and creates a superbug that would not occur in nature that then kills us all. Nice job lads!

I am wondering if they foolishly kept their backups on-line. Most of the ransomware I have seen will quietly encrypt the computer's hard drive it lands on first and then it will start looking down the shared network drives as well. I have often wondered if these larger outfits used NAS boxes with backup software that is continuously updating so that they can recover (when there's no ransomware involved) almost to the minute if they have a disk failure or the customer deletes by mistake etc.

I only look after small businesses and always use external USB hard drives to back up to that are rotated off site daily so this sort of attack is avoided. It happened to one client and I was able to recover them back within a couple of hours after clearing the infected machines. It has always bothered me how you would do this on large scale setups like I assume this company are. Is there some form of NAS that can effectively rotate and take itself off line whilst another bank takes over so that you have something that the malware can't get to?

Siv

Is "aswell" a word?